


Still Breathing

by Amy R (Brightknightie)



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Cold Case - Freeform, Forensics, Gen, Police, Search for a Cure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23735737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Amy%20R
Summary: Nick takes on a forgotten cold case and a new humanity therapy, while Schanke leads a project preparing for the reassignment of the homicide squad.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 12
Collections: 2020 FKFicFest





	Still Breathing

**_Summer 1993_ **

A file box landed on Nick’s desk with a thud.

“If you won’t join us in the records room, partner,” Schanke said, “I can bring the records room to you.”

“No escape, huh?” Nick eyed the box warily. It had no lid and no catalogue code.

“I don’t get why you’re fighting this so hard, Knight.” Schanke sank into his desk chair opposite Nick. Schanke had taken off his suit coat as soon as he’d clocked in that muggy evening, like most of the precinct, but his paisley tie was still firmly knotted.

Nick suppressed a grin and reminded himself to leave his leather jacket at home until the weather cooled. He barely felt the difference, himself, but paying attention to things like the temperature helped him fit into this mortal life he’d come to love, and pulled him on toward his own longed-for humanity. What would it be like to sweat in the heat again? With Natalie’s latest experiment — oxygen therapy, this time — was he perhaps getting closer?

“I mean, granted,” Schanke waved his hand, “you don’t care as much about our case resolution rate or your career trajectory as some people.” Schanke pointed at himself. “And we all know you’re almost as allergic to paperwork as to sunlight. But this paperwork was done ages ago by someone else. These are, like, those Indiana Jones magazines you read.”

“They’re called archaeology journals, Schank.” Nick shifted the box to the side table with the typewriter, uncovering his notes for an approaching trial. The court was going to let him videotape his testimony as usual, thank goodness. He couldn’t ask Natalie to sabotage the blinds whenever a perp refused a plea bargain. “I’m just not sure it’s the best use of my time. You’ve got those rookie uniforms on day shift helping. You don’t need me, too.”

“My ears must be going.” Captain Stonetree loomed in his office doorway, arms crossed over his suspenders. “I can’t possibly have heard Detective Knight say he’s too good to work on the unsolved homicides dogging this fair city — families still without answers, killers still walking free.”

“You know that’s not what I meant, Captain.” Nick stood. 

The project was administrative. They’d been tasked to transfer all the precinct’s cold case murder books — decades of files — from the old three-ring binders to new accordion folders, with standardized inventory sheets and dividers. More information in less space. Consistent records. The change was one of several paving the way for the rumored consolidation of the city’s homicide detectives in a single precinct next year.

Nick didn’t much like the accordion folders.

He really didn’t want to be consolidated.

“I’m not sure that I do know what you meant, Detective.” Stonetree held Nick’s gaze. When Nick dropped his eyes, Stonetree uncrossed his arms. “So here’s what _I_ meant. As long as this project lasts, it’s your second priority, after any fresh homicides that come in the door.”

“Oh, c’mon, Captain!”

“Effective now.” Stonetree closed his office door behind him.

Schanke raised his eyebrows.

Nick spread his hands. “Where do I start?”

“We have a system.” Schanke got up, walked to the file box, and pulled out some photocopied instruction sheets. “What I’ve got the uniforms doing is—” Schanke broke off and looked at his watch. “Don’t you have to get going about now?”

Nick glanced at his own watch. He leapt to his feet. He’d barely felt the approach of sunrise. Later, maybe, he could cherish that as a hint of encroaching humanity. But if he didn’t move fast now, it would be the sign of an impending day in his Caddy’s trunk. Nick pulled out his sunglasses and headed for the door. “Thanks, Schanke. See you tonight.”

“Whoah, woah, there.” Schanke dropped the instruction sheets back into the file box, picked it up, and pressed it into Nick’s arms. “Take this with you. Strangling. ‘79. Not asphyxiation — vic drowned in her own blood. Internal injuries.” A shadow flickered across Schanke’s expression, gone as fast as Nick could spot it. “You can work on it while you can’t go out. No need to thank me now; I know the long summer days are rough, with your allergy and all.”

Nick glared through his sunglasses. But he took the box with him.

**— 🜁 —**

The metal shades sank against the dawn.

Stepping into his loft from the elevator, Nick had immediately dropped the file box, grabbed his remote control, and pointed it at his tall windows. He left one shade cracked. It cast a narrow halo around the cactus on a stool in the corner. That cactus got on pretty well, considering that it must be as starved for real sunlight as Nick was, through no fault of its own. Nick felt a little guilty about the cactus. But it also gave him hope. It hung on. So could he.

Nick put his gun and holster away. Turned on his stereo. Hung up his leather jacket. Sorted yesterday’s mail on the credenza behind his couch. Moved the file box to his kitchen table. As long as he could, he did every task that came between him and facing the choice in his refrigerator.

Would he drink the real, if bovine, blood in an unlabeled bottle on the shelf? Or would he drink the — what did Natalie call it? — perfluorocarbon-based blood substitute in a bag in the drawer? He’d long since come to terms with animal blood’s shortfalls so that he could live with himself. Never again human death on his hands. The artificial blood substitute was hardly more ethical and even less satisfying. Yet it could help lead him up to the light . . . maybe, someday.

He did get tired of waiting.

The phone rang. Nick let the answering machine pick up.

“Hey, it’s Natalie. If you’re on the oxygen canister, you can’t talk, of course, and I wouldn’t expect you to, but I wanted to remind you—”

“I’m here, Nat.” Nick pressed a button and turned on the speaker.

“Oh! So you haven’t started the supplemental oxygen yet this morning? You know you need to turn it on right after you take the PFC emulsion mixture, if you’re going to get enough of the oxygenating effect.”

“I haven’t drunk it yet.”

Natalie was silent.

Nick imagined her searching for the right words to ask whether he’d fallen off the wagon again. “I was just getting things situated first,” he fudged. “Schanke sent me home with a pile of paperwork. That oxygen cylinder and concentrator unit are awkward to drag over to the table. I have them all set up, with the mask and tubes, at my piano.”

“Time to flex those mighty muscles, Tiger.” Natalie sounded relieved. “I’d tuck you into a hyperbaric chamber until your cell metabolism revs up and proves this low-blood-oxygen hypothesis, if that were practical. But this handy-dandy compact home version should get us there just the same, eventually.”

“Eventually,” Nick repeated.

“Hey! If you want to go the hyperbaric chamber route—”

Nick snorted. He got a bag of blood substitute out of the refrigerator.

“Fine, then,” Natalie said. “So what dreaded paperwork did Schank manage to foist on you?”

Nick found a large goblet and a pair of scissors to snip open the bag. He felt a pinpoint burst of triumph for not using his teeth. Baby steps. “It’s that records maintenance project. Moving all the old unsolveds from binders to pockets.”

“How exciting!”

Nick poured his meal. “I can’t believe you’re making fun of me.”

“I’m not! Everyone in my building is waiting with bated breath for you guys to get through those binders. This is the first large-scale review of unsolveds since we got DNA analysis in 1987, never mind shared databasing last year. We’ve got tissue and fluid samples on ice from long before anyone knew how they could be useful. Our predecessors preserved them just in case forensic advances someday would be able to hit a home run with them. Today’s the day, we hope.”

Nick leaned his head back. He owed the captain an apology. More, he owed generations of underappreciated civil servants his very best work.

Not to mention the victims and those who’d loved them.

Speaking of being tired of waiting.

What had Schanke said, a strangulation, fourteen, fifteen years ago? _Drowned in her own blood_ , that was it. But when Nick had glanced over the follow-up report in the murder book while putting off his meal selection, he’d seen that the original detective had pursued the case as a break-and-enter gone wrong, a burgler surprised by the victim because she’d stayed home sick that day. Strangulation seemed an unusually personal method for a random thief. And then there was the blood — the kinds of injuries that could fill airways with blood.

In the centuries before Nick had picked up the trail of his lost soul, he had closed his hands around more than one victim’s throat. It had usually been after the fact. It had made a distraction, a diversion, wringing a neck to distort the vampire’s tell-tale marks, implying a death by lack of breath, rather than lack of blood. Yet, even then, there was an intimacy . . .

Natalie made an inquiring sound.

“Just thinking.” Nick pulled himself out of his memories. “So I’d better get to it, huh?”

“Drink up and breathe deep while you do. That’s what I called to remind you. None of this ‘I don’t need to breathe’ stuff. In and out. Fill and empty those lungs. Recharge that human metabolism battery you’ve run down. Doctor’s orders.”

“Movie this Thursday?” Hanging out with his best friend would be something to look forward to while he choked down artificial blood, remembered to breathe, and dug into the dusty case.

“Count on it! VHS and data collection extravaganza. I get arterial oxygen partial pressure and saturation measurements. You get to pick the tape.”

**— 🜁 —**

“Schanke?” Nick stepped into the records room in the precinct basement. He found himself face to face with a wall of metal shelves taller than he was. The file boxes that packed the shelves were meticulously labeled, unlike the one he carried. He was sure that this room had been less crowded the last time he’d been down here. The fluorescent light was the same, though.

“Yo!” Schanke’s voice floated over the shelves.

Nick wound his way around until he came to the center of the labyrinth: one balding detective, three folding tables, six chairs, and enough office supplies to open a stationery shop. Nick set down his box.

“I read the project instructions,” Nick said, “and I started on this murder book. So I’ve got two questions for you.”

“Shoot.”

“With the rookies on day shift, and me on nights, how do you want to divvy up cases? And where did _this_ come from?” Nick pointed accusingly at his box. While a multi-volume murder book was not unusual — you used as many binders as it took — these binders looked like they’d stepped in for a punching bag. And, like their box, they had no labels on the outside.

Schanke grinned. “The binders in _that_ box had fallen out of the back of a broken file drawer. One of the uniforms dug them out when she moved a supposedly empty cabinet. She heard them slide. I thought you’d enjoy the added mystery — help you over your paperwork phobia.”

“Thanks.” Nick’s sarcasm was clipped. 

“Any time!” Schanke sat down. “So, I take it you’re on board with the project now?”

“Yeah.” Nick turned one of the chairs backward and straddled it. “Nat explained. You and the captain were right.”

Schanke blinked. “I was what? Didn’t quite get that.”

“Don’t push it, Schank.”

“Welcome to the jungle.” Schanke leaned back in his chair. “So, we have the rookie volunteers for two reasons. First, grunt work. They tape ripped pages, make photocopies, fill out forms. Second, we’re drilling home that if you want to work homicide, you should spend every second of your free time reading the old unsolveds.”

Nick shifted uncomfortably. Schanke wasn’t smiling.

“That’s how we learn. It’s not only how to put a murder book together, this report after that. It’s what’s been tried in the past and worked — or didn’t. What’s a productive inquiry and what the prosecution will never be able to use in court. That interior crime scenes are rich in evidence while exteriors get washed away. That women rarely murder, but when they do, whoah baby!” Schanke leaned forward. “Maybe some people can get that from a fancy criminology degree these days. But, otherwise, it’s live eight hundred years and see it all yourself, or study the doggone unsolveds.”

Too often, Nick let himself forget that Schanke was a good cop. One of the best. Paisley ties and all. “Or both, if you can.”

“Sure,” Schanke shook his head. A grin broke out. “If you can.” 

Schanke went on to elaborate the checkout and audit procedure that Nick had read about in the instructions. Then Schanke dove into his coded triage ranks for teasing out a promising unsolved from a hopeless one; it reminded Nick of Schanke’s green-pin-negative, red-pin-positive map system in that Hong Kong mafia case. Schanke was working mostly day shift, overseeing the rookies, and lapping into night shift to hand off to Nick.

While Schanke spoke, Nick practiced his breathing. In and out. Full lungs. It was far from the oddest thing he’d tried in pursuit of his humanity. Air and blood did both carry oxygen. And air was the element associated with blood in the old understanding of the four humors. What if . . .

“That said,” Schanke spread his hands, “you can turn in that lemon of a murder book now. Here, take one of these the rookies have already re-filed. You were spot-on that we’ll invest experienced detectives’ time in the most promising cases. I was just kidding, sticking you with that one.”

“That’s all right. I think I’ll run with this one first.”

“Oh? Interesting scenario?”

“Embarrassment of riches. If we can trust the old reports, the physical evidence includes two blood samples — different blood types; one the victim’s — and a bite swab in cold storage all these years. Easy pickings?” Nick teased, “Might improve our resolution rate.”

“Yeah! Get a request filed to Natalie’s team and see—” Schanke blinked. “Since when do you care about our resolution rate?”

Nick shrugged. 

Schanke was right; Nick paid as little attention to their cumulative metrics as he could. Instead, each individual case was everything, as long as it lasted. Something to live for. A small quest inside the big one. And this case had gasped anew in the air of his memory. Everyone deserved justice. Yet this victim stuck with him more than most. Maybe it was that she’d still been alive, hanging on, somehow, when her daughter had gotten home from school and called for help. 

Lightly, Nick said, “It’s easier to work through one in a three-ring binder. Those accordion folders are going to be a pain.”

Schanke looked at a stack of tightly re-bound murder books. “Oh, wow, imagine the day when someone has to reverse all of this and put them back into binders.”

“It’ll probably be computers by then. But maybe we can close out a few now and save them the data entry.”

“So read me in on this one.” Schanke leaned forward. “If there’s so much physical evidence, why is it still open?”

**— 🜁 —**

**_Winter 1993-94_ **

“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, Detective.” Natalie pulled a particular manila folder from a stack on her desk. “But I don’t think this was a burglary.”

“Me neither,” said Nick, distracted. He took the report and flipped eagerly to the DNA results. 

It had been months since he’d submitted the request to have the physical evidence from his pet unsolved re-analyzed. New cases had taken priority. As they should. And yet. 

Nick had been confident that the second blood sample, the one not the victim’s, would get a hit in the new system. Photos of the blood smeared on the stereo equipment stacked next to the front door had shouted to him that the theft had been staged after the murder — or, rather, while the victim lay presumed dead on the rug nearby, hanging on to life a split second at a time. One of the victim’s coworkers had had a grudge, and later had gone down for a different murder. Could that killing have been prevented, if this one had been solved? Although Nick had interviewed the original detective, now retired, Nick remained baffled that the man could have dismissed this motivation to focus on burglary. The lack of fingerprints that had seemed so telling to the first investigator seemed coincidental to Nick.

And how did the binders end up unlabeled in the bottom of a filing cabinet, really?

A DNA match now would settle it all. Immediate gratification. Closure. Magic.

These test results weren’t that. 

Nick furrowed his brow. He handed the sheet to Natalie. “What does it mean?”

“No easy win for Schanke’s resolution rate, I’m afraid.” Natalie reached out to accept the sheet and set it on her desk, but then promptly tucked her hands back in her pockets. She wore a wool sweater under her white lab coat and a knit _tuque_ over her curly brown hair. The coroner’s building heating system was in the middle of an upgrade. Eventually, it would be much better. At the moment, it was something to endure.

“Hey,” Nick said, as Natalie’s earlier words finally penetrated. “How do _you_ know it wasn’t a burglary?” He’d shared his theory of the case only with Schanke. Not even Stonetree. If the original detective had been demonstrably negligent, whether by incompetence or corruption, Internal Affairs had no expiration date.

Natalie raised her eyebrows. “Not to get too far out of my lane, here, but the autopsy indicates that the victim fought back in a struggle that broke both her hyoid and clavicle, puncturing her trachea. Blood from internal wounds slowly displaced the air in her lungs. The perp may well have thought the compression of the neck had done it, but the grip was insufficient. Just not powerful enough.”

Natalie’s breath puffed visibly into the cold air. Nick’s didn’t, not even after months of oxygen therapy. But he was wearing his winter coat and gloves for comfort as well as style; he could feel the difference just a little more this year than last. It was something to hold onto.

“You’re suggesting that this was more than not leaving a witness.”

“I’m not suggesting anything. The latest departmental staff memo was quite clear about that.” Natalie rolled her eyes. “I am stating in this report that both blood samples were the victim’s.”

“But they’re different types.”

“They were, according to the tests available in 1979. Actually, the victim had a rare blood type that sometimes tests as A, and sometimes as O. We can sort it out better today.”

Nick grimaced. Without physical evidence — or a confession — they’d never be able to charge anyone. The case could never close. That the coworker was in prison for his other crime was cold comfort. “Wait, what about the bite swab? People don’t usually bite themselves.”

Natalie handed back the page Nick had pulled out and pointed to a subsection of it. “It took Grace three days to run down that swab, I want you to know. It wasn’t in the computers. She had to find the original evidence chain-of-custody form, and then match it in cold storage.”

“Thank-you card?”

“Day-spa gift-certificate, I think. Anyway, yes, spoiler: the saliva sample is not the victim’s. But at first I thought it was, or was contaminated by the victim’s blood. When I looked at the chart, I saw two X chromosomes. Your biter is a woman.”

Nick stared. At Natalie. Then at the report in his hands. That such an assault by a woman was exceedingly rare was no excuse. He had missed something at least as big as the case’s original detective had. What women in the victim’s life had he overlooked as suspects, with his attention on the coworker? With scant hope, he asked, “Any hits in the database?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Any possibility it’s a relative?” Surely the daughter couldn’t . . .

“Doesn’t look like it. I can’t rule it out completely, of course, but close? Not likely.”

Nick leaned against the counter. Nothing occurred to him. He’d been so sure. “Maybe it’s time to put this case back on the shelf.”

“You could do that. Pack it up nicely for the next generation and wish them better luck.”

“But?”

“No buts. It’s a thing a detective could do.” Natalie leveled her gaze. “Is it something Nick Knight can do?”

Nick was silent.

“I’ve seen you give up a couple of times, Nick. It’s _human_ to get discouraged. We all do. Some people think that we have only so much willpower, and when we use it up, we’re just out, like your gas-guzzling Caddy. I think willpower is more like a muscle. The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets.”

“Are we still talking about the case?”

“Are you still taking your PFC emulsion mixture with the supplemental oxygen? How about the tanning bed? Vitamins?”

“I forget the vitamins a lot,” Nick admitted. “I’ve tried to stick with the oxygen. I hate the tanning bed. I think my cactus likes it, though.”

A grin tugged at Natalie’s lips. “You have my report. Share it with your partner. As your Medical Examiner, it’s now out of my hands.”

“And as my friend?”

“You don’t really need me to tell you this, do you?” Natalie tilted her head. “If you can’t solve it today, fine. Living to fight another day is not surrender. But, right now, most of the people involved in that case are alive. Some of them are still wondering every day what happened. One of them knows. Whether you become human sooner or later or never, how will you feel if this case stays unsolved, and you didn’t give it everything you had?”

“Guilty.” There was no question. No, Nick hadn’t needed Natalie to tell him. It helped, anyway. In modern archaeology, you leave part of a site unexcavated for future advances in technology and methodology. You don’t put all research on hold until those advances come. “Thank you — and Grace — for the report. I’ll show it to Schanke. We’ll figure it out.”

**— 🜁 —**

**_Fall 1995_ **

Nick had written his letter of resignation. He had come to the precinct to give it to Captain Reese, along with his badge and gun. With Schanke dead in such a meaningless way, Nick felt like the Nick Knight who had been Schanke’s partner couldn’t go on existing. It was over. Finished.

He was all out of hope. The only way he knew was to start again.

But, for now, Nick just sat at Schanke’s desk, staring at papers. Forms. Reports. The occasional clipping from _The Police Special_.

At the bottom of a drawer, Nick found both volumes of that first old murder book he and Schanke had never stopped chewing over, from Stonetree’s precinct through the consolidation to Cohen’s. Now Reese’s. The pages were still in their distinctively beaten-up three-ring binders, though now carefully labeled and tracked, fighting the tide of time until the case could be laid to rest. Nick turned to the very end. 

He found a copy of a form from just last week.

Schanke had requested an order for surveillance on the victim’s husband’s ex-girlfriend. He’d wanted to surreptitiously obtain a DNA sample to compare with the bite swab. And he’d requested a check on the daughter’s contact information. He’d anticipated having something to tell her at last.

Nick gasped. Then he breathed. In and out. How long had it been since he had breathed, really? Like a human? His lungs ached. Or maybe that was his heart. 

Resignation forgotten, Nick reached for the phone to follow-up on the surveillance request. The whole of the Metro force, and RCMP besides, was investigating Vudu. Nick was supposed to be on leave. Fine. They could handle the bomber. He would investigate the ex-girlfriend.

He felt like Nick Knight again. A battered Nick Knight, to be sure, but, nevertheless, himself. More than in at least a year. Schanke had handed him the baton in this relay; Nick would carry it on to the finish line or to the next runner. Either way. He could wait.

No death could be meaningless in a life as meaningful as Schanke’s.

When Nick finished his call, he looked up and saw Tracy. Nick opened his mouth to tell her that she should use his desk; he would keep Schanke’s.

She pointed at the worn volumes of the murder book. “I dug those out of the bottom of a filing cabinet my second year in uniform.” She cocked her head. “Why are they still in three-ring binders?”

**— end —**

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer.** This is fanfiction of _Forever Knight_. Please don’t mistake it for anything else. (“Murder books” exist. Vampires don’t.)
> 
> **Beta-reading.** Thank you, Skieswideopen! She generously and thoughtfully asked important questions, pointed out errors, and encouraged me mightily. Thank you!
> 
> **Inspiration.** This story addresses the 2020 FKFicFest story prompt “cold case.” It is extensively inspired and informed by the epilogue of the nonfiction book _The Lazarus Files: A Cold Case Investigation_ by Matthew McGough (2019). Real Toronto PD procedures, jargon, and experiences surely differ from the Los Angeles area circumstances chronicled by McGough, but FK’s fictional Metro PD can flex, I hope. And of course Wikipedia provided the medical keywords for Natalie’s therapeutic experiment and dates for when certain forensic resources came into use.
> 
> **Canon.** Most of this story unfolds inside the hiatus — the long gap between first and second seasons. Except for the ending, which hopes to reroute “Black Buddha” and everything that comes after it, this story’s precise canon references are few and fleeting (“False Witness,” “Killer Instinct,” “Cherry Blossoms,” “Hunters”). 
> 
> **Thank you for reading!** Please let me know what you think. How can I do better next time?


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